Social Media

The Real Value of Web 2.0 (Hint: It's not Facebook)

There has been a lot of talk from folks on the usefulness of Twitter, at least during the days preceding the announcement of Facebook and Microsoft's wedding. As I mentioned before, I was a little late to the game on Twitter, but it's quickly becoming my favorite social network, and represents the best of what I think is the power of Web 2.0. Despite all the 'exciting' news about Facebook over the last 36 hours, I have to admit, I'm experiencing a bit of Facebook fatigue. Doc Searls talked a bit about this the other day:

If I could gang-whittle [my requests and notifications], I might be more interested, but the routine still involves declining to check off which of many different ways I met somebody (”both owned the same dog”, “set up by a mutual ex-boss” or whatever), and other time-sucks. Not to mention that the site takes many seconds to load, or to bring up email, or whatever. At least for me.

The attraction to social networks is theoretically supposed to be the business and life-benefits, and that means making my life easier, not more involved. I have a personal Facebook primary social graph of about 100 'friends', and if I go a week without logging into Facebook (an occurrence happening with increasing frequency), it means I need to spend the first fifteen minutes of usage sorting through all the changes in my network, requests to play poker, and fortune cookies, and pleas to start 'biting chumps.' This, to me, does not make my social interaction on the web any more seamless.

On the other hand, I can think of a couple examples of tools I use in my daily life as a web-based journalist that make my experience a ton more effortless: Google Reader and Twitter.

Whether by design or by accident, Google Reader has streamlined my daily reporting and research time by hours and hours. I do a daily one-hour podcast on politics and technology, maintain my personal technology blog and write editorials and news pieces here at Mashable. In the past, at least in the days before Google Reader, I would probably only have time for one of those activities. In years past, when I've attempted a daily podcast, it took at least a team of two several hours of scouring the web, copying and pasting research into a word document, and then synchronizing our document with one another before even a bit of production is done. Now, I'm able to throw all the RSS feeds to my trusted sources and corporate blogs into Google Reader, page through them with reckless abandon for the 24 hours preceding a show-time, and whenever I find something I like, hit the share button. Then, about an hour before the show, I simply page through my shared items, tag the ones I'll use on the show appropriately, and get ready to hit the record button.

What happens behind the scenes during this set of effortless actions is that two separate RSS feeds are then generated by Google Reader - one of which ends up being a link blog available for distribution through my website, and the other ends up being fed into a Tumblr account, which conveniently serves as the public podcast show notes page. All tagging and show descriptions can be essentially automated by the process by the natural course of things.

Similarly, Twitter automates much of the "news tipping" process, and expands my reach far beyond what my actual popularity would normally allow. The audience for my personal blog and podcast have reached into the low thousands per day, but with Twitter and its ability to expand my social graph, I'm able to tap into the stream of consciousness of folks who live in the same niches that I do, and expand the variety of news tips coming my way. It's not just me who's noticing the value of Twitter as a buzz-tracker. Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote recently about how Twitter is paying his rent:

Earlier this week I was remarking (on Twitter) about how many of my recent story leads came from Twitter. I counted and at that time 5 of my last 11 stories were based on news I learned first from my friends on Twitter. It was amazing. Were those good stories? Was the time and attention I was paying to Twitter worthwhile? Let's put it this way: yesterday was the end of a nice streak for me. I had 6 stories over the previous 7 week days hit the front page of Digg - including several of the stories I found via Twitter.

Point being: These tools are streamlining my life. No longer am I required to hang out on the time consuming forums for twenty different niches or various IRC chat rooms. I simply open up Twitter's access to GTalk, add the folks that I come across in the niches I want to be connected to, and keep a casual eye on what flows through that window. Sure, it has its fair share of off topic tweets, but no more off topic chatter than you'd find in your typical chat room or forum.

There are other qualms I have about Facebook that aren't really germane to the train of thought I have running here, but to bring it back around to Facebook (or most social networks, for that matter), I'm not seeing them really streamlining my life in practice as much as they should. The reasons I joined Facebook had a lot to do with what I was hearing from Ken Rutkowski and Robert Scoble: anyone that's important in technology is here. I enjoyed Ken and Robert's Facebook-exclusive daily video interview posts, but the folks I joined to connect up with answer their Facebook inbox less frequently than they answer their regular email.

Every time I've attempted to use Facebook for time-sensitive communication, without fail the messages are not read in a reasonable amount of time, and responses come too late, or messages are never replied to in the first place. And that's after I've waded through twenty or so notifications have been sorted through. Facebook is not acting as a conversation enabler, it's acting as a conversation and social connection inhibitor. That, in my opinion, is the opposite of the goal for Web 2.0.

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